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Sugata Mitra on edtech and empire

In his 2013 TED talk at Long Beach California, Sugata Mitra gave a bold political twist to his story of education by placing it in the context of a grander story about empire. The now familiar story of the hole in the wall project (where children in an Indian slum were given unsupervised access to a computer built into a wall) is given a new political radicalism, expressing a radical opposition to imperialism.

Let’s have a closer look at this new anti-imperialism – and let’s have a look at it, if not from the standpoint of the slums, at least with the slums in mind – the slums without which Sugata Mitra might still be an unknown scientist working for a little-known company in New Delhi instead of being a professor at MIT, the inspiration behind an internationally popular film (Slumdog Millionaire) and a darling of the TED stage with one of the highest profile “ideas worth sharing”. Remove the slum from the story and Sugata Mitra’s message does nothing more than confirm what every parent in California already knew, i.e. that given a new game console their children can figure out how to use it without reading the manual. What turned Mitra’s story into an idea worth sharing was the image of children in the Indian slum facing the blank wall of seemingly insuperable poverty – a wall in which Sugata Mitra opened a hole giving a view of a brighter future beyond. What inspires most is not the idea of children learning things by themselves, but the idea that digital technology can open up huge holes in the walls of poverty and deprivation. It certainly is inspiring, in the way that an imaginative retelling of the Cinderella story might be inspiring, with Sugata Mitra playing the role of the fairy godmother, but is it as politically radical as the new talk about empire might lead us to believe?

With the soft avuncular tone of a man who has the very best intentions, Sugata Mitra begins his TED talk:

“I tried to look at where the kind of learning we do in schools came from. If you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it’s quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet.”

On the stage we see:

“Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine.”

Mitra wants to argue that mainstream schools, with all their emphasis upon standardisation, uniformity, rote learning, punctuality, linearity and so on, were set up originally to train the administrative minions of an empire that tried to run the entire planet – minions who would dutifully perform their functions as regularly as clockwork within the gargantuan pre-digital administrative machine.

The reference to empire and the huge graphic with so much of the world marked out in angry areas of deep red tap into the anti-imperialist sensitivities of the wealthy audience in democratic California. If any of them know details of the British involvement in India they might know about the Amritsar massacre and have in the back of their minds the image of General Dyer on 13 April 1919 giving the order for the British soldiers to shoot into the crowd of unarmed protestors – shots fired without an order to disperse being issued – shots that continue until all the ammunition is finished – shots followed by a refusal to allow the wounded to be removed and cared for – all to teach the people of the Punjab a lesson – an imperial lesson written in blood.

Mitra taps into these anti-imperialist sentiments, but he is careful to keep his own telling of the story bloodless. The only victims of empire seem to be the white children who are forced to wear uniforms and sit in rows in school and spend so much time learning how to write well and do mental arithmetic.

Mitra’s radicalism keeps our opposition focused on the fate of those privileged children: “The students must be identical to each other…They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.” This way of telling the story not only conceals the greater injustice perpetrated beyond the ranks of the privileged, but it also empties the modern principle of identity – of equality – of all its political radicalism. Is there not an identity that deserves to be recognised? Every voice raised against imperial exclusion is a voice that claims a more fundamental equality – an equality that challenges empire.

But the most questionable remark that Mitra makes about empire is the one he makes next:

“The empire is gone.”

Mitra wants to argue that we don’t need to waste time arguing about the rights and wrongs of the old way of educating the privileged children of the empire. It is enough to recognise that the empire is over, from which it follows that there is no historical need any longer for its system of schooling.

“The empire is gone.”

I imagine Mitra hesitating before saying that, wondering how the audience would take it. It is a claim that would have offended other ears – ears in Baghdad, Kabul, and the Naxalite villages of West Bengal, for instance, where Indian villagers are still being forced from their land at gunpoint to make way for multinational mining companies. But the privileged audience in California accepts the claim without a ripple of objection.

It is at this point that Mitra looks to us no longer like the fairy godmother telling the children of the slums that they will go to the millionaire’s ball, but like Alice going through some mirror-like hole in a yellow-brick Californian wall into a crazy world of make-believe.

This is a Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee version of the end of history thesis. Mitra, who started by tapping into our anti-imperialist sentiments, now tells us that there is nothing to get agitated about any longer except for odd remnants of the dead empire – remnants like the old-fashioned schools.

Mitra continues his journey on the far side of the looking glass by describing what he sees as the future of work: “people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want.” This is a completely ridiculous view of where the world is heading, but only if you can mistake such folly for the truth, can you believe that the future of education should involve the sort of thing Mitra goes on to suggest: having teachers and schools and communities step aside to let the children educate themselves as much as possible online so that they grow up with the habit of doing whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want.

While being told about current trends, Mitra’s audience are shown this:

Mitra seems to be looking around now and seeing only silicon valleys running down to Californian beaches. He seems to have completely forgotten the Kalkaji slum that spreads out beneath the window of the office at NIIT in New Delhi where he used to work – a slum that speaks more loudly of empire than any row of desks that Mitra might find in any school in the world, since the existence of the slum can be traced back to the British Raj which drew civil lines around the protected enclaves of the affluent and forced everyone else to live in areas designated uncivil. That slum, like others in India, is growing. About a quarter of all the inhabitants of India’s larger cities live in slums, and the total slum population of India is estimated to have risen from 43 million in 2001 to 93 million in 2011, growing on average at a rate of 5% a year. There is no sign that we are just around the corner from a society in which everyone will live in a nice suburban home with broadband in a silicon valley only a short drive from the beach. On the contrary, there is every sign that the growth of wealth in the silicon valleys of the USA is joined at the hip to the perpetuation of poverty in places like Kalkaji, where a shocking number of people still dream, not of broadband, but of having their own toilet.

The slums are growing not where current policies are failing, but where they are working “best”. They represent not the failure of the system, but its success. When we think of the future and think of the affluent employee doing what he wants, when he wants, where he wants with his laptop on his knee, we ought not to forget the vast pool of cheap, poorly-regulated and unorganised labour that the system producing the laptops needs – a system in which the slums have their role to play.

It would be nice to just ignore Mitra’s cukooland in the cloud view of history, but his idea of, for instance, a self-organising learning environment (SOLE) where children educate themselves online with as little intervention from the teacher as possible gets all its persuasive force from the perception that we are only a few steps away from a perpetually peaceful self-organising society – a society in which all the children of the slums will be equal participants once they figure out how to code and once they save up enough money for a laptop. If this view of history is wrong, then the main reason for embracing this model of education collapses.

Just a hole in the wall?

What initially sounded like a radical story turns out to be something that merely played with our anti-imperialist sentiments while concealing the persistence of empire. It is also utterly unradical in its ignorance of the way the computer at the heart of its edtech pedagogy is itself bound up with that persistent empire.

Mitra assumes that empire is one thing and computers are another. Computers have nothing to do with empire and politics. He sees nothing political – nothing imperial – in plastering a computer into the wall of the Kalkaji slum.

What is this computer in the hole in the wall? Is it a perfectly innocent educational tool, as Mitra wants to construe it? We do not have the eyes of the children of the slum, but if we imagine looking through such eyes, how does the computer in the hole in the wall look?

Sugata Mitra’s colleagues at HiWEL Ltd (the company that has carried on the hole in the wall project, assisted by funding from an organisation with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials: the World Bank) offer three interpretations on their website:

“For experts, like Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, Hole-in-the-Wall is a ‘Shared Blackboard’ which children in underprivileged communities can collectively own and access, to express themselves, to learn, to explore together, and at some stage to even brainstorm and come up with exciting ideas.”

Do the children believe that they own the computers plastered so immovably into the wall of their slum? Is it not more likely that the computers are recognised for what they are: impossibly expensive objects that they could never own? Seen in this way, doesn’t the computer with its fittings and the wall around it painted bright yellow and red to attract the children start to look like some high-tech bauble dangling in that hole in the wall, advertising a world of wealth that the children can only dream of?

Another interpretation from the same page:

“For villagers, it is more like a village well, where children assemble to draw knowledge and, in the process, engage in meaningful conversation and immersive learning activities that broaden their horizons.”

Do children in the village see it as a well? A well is something going deep into the ground, a visible link to the hidden powers of nature. Does the computer not take the children away from the space of their village and the obscure nature on which it rests? Do the children draw knowledge from the computer or are the children drawn away from the village to a virtual city of high-tech amibitions?

“Activities that broaden their horizons.” Is this new horizon something that the children just enjoy looking at, as if they were watching a documentary about penguins at the Antarctic, or is it a view of a life they start wanting to be a part of – a life that, in all likelihood, they will not be able to be a part of?

And the last of the three readings:

“For children, it is an extension of their playground where they can play together, teach each other new things, and more importantly, just be themselves.”

The village playground was a space that probably cost nothing, decorated entirely by figments of the children’s imaginations drawing on the culture that they were born into. It wasn’t something that could only be bought by getting deep into debt – a debt that could not be paid off before the technology of the new playground became obsolete.

“The children can just be themselves.” How are the children just being themselves if they are struggling with a foreign language while working out how to use a tool they will never be able to own?

And does the computer which the HiWEL people want to say is an innocent part of local life not introduce a very political concept of time? Does the shiny technology – aided by a thousand billboards – not speak to the children of the future? Does it not teach the children that the village is the past and tech is the future? Do the children not learn to think of historical time, not in terms of their own cultural imagination, which might view time as cyclical, but in terms of the linear progress of technology – the progress from bytes to kilobytes to megabytes and now to terabytes?

Why do Sugata Mitra and his colleagues not see that they are to the new empire what General Dyer was to the older one? The methods are different, of course. General Dyer knew that bullets would have to be used to teach the natives to accept the foreign culture. Sugata Mitra and HiWEL Ltd, by contrast, have found a way to make the children of the natives dream the dreams of which the new empire is made. The result, though, is the same, is it not?

When speaking to the Guardian newspaper Mitra described how his edtech opens the door not just to information but to a new world of dreams. He refers specifically to his experience of online learning in the UK:

“I’m encouraging kids to use computers at their own pace to build aspirations.

“Too many pupils at schools in the UK want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models, because that’s what they’re constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time. I use the internet to introduce them to unlikely heroes, such as material about people working for Nasa, and volunteers in Congo, then I leave them to do their own research, unsupervised. After as little as eight or 10 exposures, the kids have new dreams about what to do with their lives.”

There is a lovely naivety here about technology and empire – about how the activities at NASA rest on an imperial pyramid of wealth that funnels profits to the top by exploiting those at the bottom – about how the volunteers in the Congo live lifestyles that perpetuate the very same system that produces and reproduces the dire conditions in the Congo that the volunteers want to help.

If the technology can inspire new dreams in the relatively affluent children of the UK, it is likely to do the same with children in the slums – getting them dreaming dreams that could only be realised by their becoming willing participants in the very same system that produces and reproduces the slums.

If we are concerned about empire, we need to see not only that certain kinds of traditional schooling can foster an unthinking support for empire but that certain forms of edtech unschooling can do the same.

Children and empire

The failure of Mitra’s pseudo-radicalism is evident not only in his naïve idea that computers have nothing to do with empire, but also in his equally naïve idea that children have nothing to do with empire. For evidence of this let’s look at the story of one child (as told on the HiWEL website). Here is the story of Suresh:

“Suresh (name changed) lost his father, a rickshaw puller, at the tender age of two. Pressurized by her family, the responsibility of a mentally challenged daughter and lack of financial support, his mother gave him up at a Nirmal Chhaya Home in Delhi with the hope of her son receiving better care than what she would be able to provide him. He says, “I had never even seen a computer closely before I started using the Learning Station. It is a beautiful opportunity for children like us who do not have access to such things. We hear from other children in our class about computers and internet but very rarely do children like us get a chance to experience it first-hand.” Suresh describes how he enjoys listening to ‘Meena ki kahani’ stories and likes games such as matching objects. In the recent past, he has familiarized himself with the ‘paint’ application which he proudly states he has learnt completely on his own despite finding it difficult initially.

“In the beginning, Suresh felt the need for a teacher to help them with the Learning Station but with time he has realized that learning something through his own efforts has given him confidence and now he proudly explores all the applications. Suresh is interested in using the internet and is fascinated by email after his friends at school told him about it. He is grateful to the Home for providing him with the basic amenities he requires, ability to attend school and access to the LS which he believes will help him in building a strong future.

“He says, “I dream of becoming a cricketer and make my country proud.” Yet the young boy is realistic and says he is also pursuing courses in mobile repairing and electrical work as back up. His ultimate dream remains to be financially independent so that he can set up a house for his mother and restore the home he lost.”

How do we view Suresh? Do we see him simply as a poor child whose plight tugs at our heart strings – a child in so much need – a child who could benefit from learning how to use the paint application of a computer built into the wall of his orphanage? This would seem to be how Sugata Mitra and his colleagues at HiWEL Ltd see matters. Isn’t this a rather myopic and superficial view – one that sees in the background only a fuzzy image of poverty and deprivation?

If we try to bring that background more into focus, we might notice a few odd facts, such as the facts about the tax breaks the Indian government has been giving to multinational companies. We see then the political decision to favour the interests of big business instead of providing a greater level of security for families like Suresh’s so that the poorest don’t feel they have to hand children over to orphanages. Instead of merely feeling sympathy for a poor child in an orphanage, isn’t there reason here to be angry about the injustice of the system behind his being put into the orphanage? But Mitra’s pseudo-radicalism conceals all this – conceals the way in which Suresh is a victim of a new empire – an empire that will leave its own children languishing hopelessly in orphanages if the overriding imperative of attracting foreign capital requires it.

Community and empire

One of the concepts conspicuously absent from Mitra’s critique of empire is that of community. He is all in favour of children working in groups to learn from each other, but he seems hostile to the idea of a community organising itself and organising the education of its children. He seems to lump all such communities and social systems together as being one with the British Empire, as if, inside every teacher there hides a General Dyer and inside every community leader there hides a Queen Victoria, and that to avoid imperialism in education, the bulk of it must be entrusted to computer programmers and corporations with a proven anti-imperialist track record like Apple, Microsoft and Google.

What Mitra fails to see is the blatant imperialism in the attitude he and HiWEL Ltd take to the communities in the slum. One mark of the imperialist is his refusal to listen to the natives. That is exactly the attitude that Mitra and his colleagues took when they first began the hole in the wall project. They avoided all dialogue. They did not go into the slum and ask those who could speak on behalf of the communities there what they believed was needed and how their children should be educated. He did not ask them, for instance, if the children should become literate first in their mother tongue or in English. He did not ask them about the design of the applications to be installed on the computers. No, Mitra – like his British predecessors – had already decided what software to install and what the main language was to be. In one of his talks about the project he recounted with a broad smile on his face that the first English word the children learnt was “Google”, failing to see the parallel with those other children long ago looking down the barrel of General Dyer’s gun – children whose first English word might have been “Victoria”.

Mitra wants to call his approach to education minimally invasive because it involves so little input from the flesh and blood teacher and because it stops the local community “invading” the minds of its children. What he fails to appreciate is that his sort of minimally invasive education can also be maximally imperial – the computer and the software on it speak as clearly of empire as did the bayonet on the end of General Dyer’s rifle.

To try to refrain from this arrogant imperial attitude we will need to be more respectful of the local communities – communities which, arguably, constitute the only hope for genuine opposition to empire. Where else would any real opposition come from? It certainly wouldn’t come from children who have been lured away from their communities by the toys of the rich and who have come to dream of working at NASA. It will come instead (if at all) from communities who find more effective ways of organising themselves and defending their interests – which might include helping their children both resist and understand the seductions of empire that well-intentioned edtech gurus like Sugata Mitra might place before them.

If we think through the issue of empire more carefully and see the way the digital edtech promoted by people like Sugata Mitra is actually implicated in it, we might see the need for a more positive notion of schooling. Instead of casting doubt on the legitimacy of any and every school, urging teachers to step aside to let more of education be organised by companies operating online, we might see the need for schools that have a renewed sense of purpose in a hugely unjust and exploitative global empire animated by dreams that thrive on ignorance and insensitivity.

………..

Note

To see the video of the Sugata Mitra talk at TED in February 2013 see:

24 Responses to “Sugata Mitra on edtech and empire”

I think I understand some of where you’re coming from, but you’ve allowed one presentational slight to color your reaction to the whole idea.The concept of furthering computer literacy as described by Mr. Mitra in this talk has some implications as a new subjugation method, but the extent you take them to are absurd. I find this type of dogma extremely irritating; wherein if a proposed solution does not fix all of the problems, it obviously fixes none of them and is therefore no good. Another thing you need to consider in terms of cultural diversity and what these children will be exposed to, is that by creating a computer literate generation that crosses national and class lines, the diversity of culture will bleed its way into the internet. That’s the beauty of the internet, it’s ALL there, and if you have something to say, you can say it. So why wouldn’t we want everyone to have the tools and skill set to get at what’s there, and be able to contribute to it. A lot of the bias going into this article seems to mirror my own, and I guess that’s why I get so touchy when I see how fragile a good idea is. I have faith in our species, and if you provide the youth with the tools and skills to learn, there is little else you need to do. When exactly does a person mature to the point where they are allowed to choose what interests them, otherwise?

Thanks for taking the trouble to write that. You criticise my dogma. Where am I dogmatic? I do not wish to be. My intention is to draw attention to one or two myths that Mitra seems to be spreading. You very nicely repeat one of those myths in your comment: the myth of digital technology as a place where all cultures can meet as if on an equal footing – the myth of the cultural neutrality of the internet. Perhaps in a different society the internet could function in a more neutral way. As it stands, it is far from neutral. A simple example: To have access to the internet you need a computer. A computer plastered into a wall is recognised as being a poor substitute for having your own computer – a device which is designed now not as a boring functional box, but as an object of desire, and it is expensive, and its performace is measured according to various numerical parameters, and it will become obsolete very quickly. All of these things can be ignored, but they fit into a wider culture and way of life that is very attractive and seduces people into a whole fragmented world of value without them ever having chosen it consciously.

Michael, I also began as a Marxist and I still think the early philosophical manuscript ideas about alienation are spot on. It would be nice if you could have summed up in a sentence what you see as my error regarding the idea of imperialsm. However, the post doesn’t try to make any bold claims about the economy of empire. Instead it relies on a perception that Mitra is wrong in thinking that we are just around the corner from a social order in which the notion of empire would be obsolete. I take it that we agree on Mitra’s error there.

No, I have no experience of rural India. There is a nice assessment of some of the failures of the hole in the wall project in an article by Payal Arora called “Hope in the Wall” showing abandoned learning stations – abandoned because of a failure by HiWEL to cooperate well with local communities.

You say “What Mitra fails to see is the blatant imperialism in the attitude he and HiWEL Ltd take to the communities in the slum” And I think it’s fair to say that argument appears a couple of places in your post. My point is one can’t really understand imperialism without a sense of the political economy that has been evolving in the West since at least the 1700’s. I look at Marx insights as still the best insights on economics.

Michael, yes, I see where you are going and it sounds as if we are fellow travellers. I guess the point is this: The problem with the tech that we have is largely a problem with capitalism. We live in a massively capitalist economy, and the tech that gets developed is the tech that can be sold at a profit.

The post is already very long. Hardly anyone reads anything longer than about 1,000 words (assuming they can get beyond 140 characters). Hence the reluctance to make it longer.

Well, you have written a huge post on something that you are not very clear about, at least in your writing.
But all I can say is that Mitra and his colleagues, unlike the British Empire in India, did not forcefully made the children to use those terminals in the walls. All they were doing was an experiment from which the children benefited without losing their freedom of choice.
You may argue that he “lured” the children just as the Britishers “lured” many Indians into special perks and benefits as compared to others and win their support for the ultimate overtake of India. But I still find it highly unlikely to see that one day Mr. Mitra or some company he is associated with will actually force people to buy only computers from one company and create a monopoly. They are just opening another frontier for spreading literacy and “luring” the children to learn things and get motivated for higher education (which is a good thing to be lured into).
I know, the initiative seems similar to what Sir Ken Robinson, or Mr. Salman Khan (KhanAcademy) or Coursera and edX are doing. While the latter initatiaves are for those who have access to the means of technology and know what they want but don’t have their easy access, the former one (by Mr. Mitra) is intended to children who have “no access” and would otherwise be drawn into the slum life instead of thinking about pursuing higher education. See the difference?

Have you read “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley? There is a very simple debate about who was closer to the truth: George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. As I see it, Huxley won hands down. The empire is one of seduction, not compulsion. Having said that, if you are a powerful player and you refuse to be seduced, there is every likelihood that the old Orwellian forces will be unleashed on you (witness Saddam Hussein).

Yes, no one is forcing the children, and there is still competition between Apple, Microsoft, Negroponte’s company, etc., etc., but it is a fact – is it not – that the technology is promoting a set of very particular ways of life and a very particular economy – an economy that looks and feels to some of us like a new empire.

As an Indian who climbed out of poverty, I think the author is the real imperialist. Anything that gives ANY chance for a poor kid to advance in life is to be recommended. It might not be perfect, but it is better than nothing. And what is the connection to “empire”?

Thanks for leaving the comment, Amal. If we look at the case of any individual child, you are right, and anything that gives that child a chance to get on in life is good. But is it not possible to stand back and see the bigger picture and see that things are not so simple? For instance, for decades now the powers that be have been pushing a model of development. In some respects things have improved, but in other respects there have been some very worrying consequences (e.g. tying countries into a very unstable global system; greatly increasing inequality; forcing significant sectors of the rural population into slums; etc.). As we see it, Mitra is unwittingly helping to promote this neo-liberal model of development. Our conviction is that there has to be a better way of aiding and allowing countries like your own to move forward. We want to speak out in favour of such an alternative. We also want to speak out against the politics of the status quo – a politics that Mitra’s humanitarianism refuses to address (for instance, the question of a right to education – HiWEL is happy to leave some children without a real right to an education – yes what Mitra and HiWEL offer is something, and so better than nothing, but it is not enough, and instead of being pleased with their charity, we should be angry about the injustice and the sytem that lead to children like Suresh being handed over to the orphanage in the first place). In many parts of the world – not just in the Indian slums – a major factor holding some children back educationally is poverty. Mitra’s approach ignores that. For us, there is the concern that Mitra’s humanitarianism unwittingly affirms a system and a model of development that perpetuate the very poverty and injustice that the HiWEL computers and the school in the cloud is meant to help.

The critique is the same sort of critique that was made of the huge amount of charitable help that was given to the starving children of Ethiopia back in the 1980s. The (white) people calling for the aid to be given showed only images of starving children in camps. Nothing was said at the time about the bigger picture. There was a civil war going on (in effect) with the government actively displacing people, and the aid coming in was (in a way) helping the government in its forcible displacement. Nothing was said about the civil war. Mitra puts us in a similar situation: asking us to care about the children without getting angry about the terrible politics going on in the background – the politics that is the root cause of the problem – and shouldn’t we be addressing the root cause instead of just trying to treat the symptoms? Shouldn’t we be campaigning to end the poverty and insecurity that lead, for instance, to children like Suresh being handed over to orphanages, or should we be happy just to make sure that the orphanages have a good internet connection?

Thanks for your reply to my comments.
But I think that you are from a developed country, so naturally you have the luxury of liberal thought.
In my childhood I have seen people in abject poverty. Having a bicycle meant you were wealthy. Now in India, everyone seems to have at least a motor bike. School teachers have cars. I can’t give away good used clothes because no one will take them. Previously people were lucky to have one decent set of clothes. My house servant (to whom I provide living quarters) took a loan, bought a house, rented it out, and is happily paying off his mortgage. He has a motorbike, takes his family to movies, and will walk out if I act like a bad boss.
The list of improvements I have seen in 40 years is endless You people focus on the slums in India, without looking at the TVs and fridges in the same slums..
The reason for the slums is a totally different subject – like why real estate in Mmbai is more expensive than in Mahattan, London or Tokyo. Indians earn way below what those people earn, so there is no way that an average Indian can move from village to city and afford to buy a decent house in a city. The result are the slums.
I challenge you to visit any Indian slum and find a really poor person. You will find cable TV, laptops, and kids going to school with dreams.
Without meaning to insult anyone, I think you and Mitra are the same type – lots of theories, without any experience on the ground. Lots of good living in good countries, with no real worries.
Everyone seems to glorify Indian slums.
I think, whatever system helped in lifting so many millions out of starvation level poverty, is good. It is not the most perfect system, but it works. Otherwise, do you have an alternative system in mind?
Finally, on Empire (Still have not figured out the connection between a laptop & an old empire). Look, at that time in history, India had no chance of escaping from being part of some European Empire. No one likes to be ruled by foreigners, but we were lucky that the British took us. The French, Dutch, Portugese, Belgians were real monsters.
We were ruled by Brits, but we also got universities, rule of law, infrastructure, democracy, social improvements by decree…..There were many savages among the Brits. But there were so many more Brits who cared for us, felt for us, tried to help us improve.
Can any Vietnamese say the same for the French? Or any Inonesian for the Dutch?

Dear Amal, thank you for another interesting comment. To an extent you are right about us. We are more theory than experience. We have never been to an Indian slum. The nearest we got was Pakistan, but that was back in the 1980s. We would have travelled into India but the Punjab border was closed.

I hope we don’t give the impression that we are trying to speak for the people living in slums. We were careful to say early on in the post that we do not speak from the standpoint of the slums, but only with the slums in mind.

We have no experience of the slums, but we do have experience of a few groups of people who are relatively poor. Our experience confirms what you say: i.e. that many of the poor are dreaming of being rich and are taking out loans in order to have what they think will be the sweet taste of the rich life. Part of our criticism of Mitra is that by dangling his high-tech toys in front of the children, he is helping to inspire the same sort of dreams – the dreams that motivate the system that will forever perpetuate relative poverty.

We dream, not of poverty (although we think a certain embrace of austerity will be necessary), but of breaking out of that system.

It is that system that constitutes the new empire – the empire of wealth accumulation, where for people it is the material trappings of wealth that matter, but for the system as a whole it is the numbers that matter only (the GDP). This is, in a sense, a very digital empire.

It works, you say. Yes, it works to the extent that it gives more people more things, providing they can find the money to buy them. But was it working in 2008 when the world financial system came close to a total meltdown? Is it working in Mumbai, where, as you say, real estate prices bear no relation to average local wages? Was it working in Iraq, where the decision to sell oil in euros arguably led to the deaths of a million people? Is it working in Greece (where we are now) where youth unemployment is above 50% and the working lives of an entire generation are being sacrificed? Is it not working far better for a tiny elite than it is for the vast majority insofar as inequality is rising? Is it working to promote democracy, culture and political progress, or does this model of economic progress require that we forget about our democratic and political and cultural aspirations? Will the system work when there is the next spike in food prices – a spike that will be exaggerated by well-fed people trying to make money on the futures markets – when there will be riots again as people go hungry?

By the way, I have visited more countries than I care to remember. From USA, Canada, all of Europe, many in Africa, middle east, to the Far East. Most countries were visited while some company paid me an exorbitant day rate + expenses.
Everwhere I go, I study things in depth – like prices of gas, beer or rice or whatever. I read local newspapers, I talk to people in depth, I visit families, I go to slums (if any).
I have also read Marx, have thousands of books in my home library.
So I think that my opinions are not knee jerk.

While you seem a highly educated person, you don’t seem to get the importance of the discoveries of Mr Mitra. In fact you seem to despise them. Of course Mitra seems a little over the edge and selfsatisfied, and to be experimenting like some mad scientist with peopl, and of course imperialism has taken new, frightening forms of control (as the former ones were), but rather than creating new needs or fake models in these kids minds, he giving them happiness, motivation (for whatever purpose they might decide on their own, even defeating imperialism one way or another) and this motivation will last for a lifetime. So drop your pessimism.

Thanks for reading the post, Alex, and going to the trouble to leave a comment. Your reference to “frightening forms of control” seems to miss the point. As I underlined in a previous comment for this post, the new empire is a Huxley empire that works more by seduction than oppression. It leaves individuals free to do what they want. But when you look around and see the result, you see people willingly supporting a system that perpetuates inequality, that brings more and more of social life under the logic of the market, that insists upon perpetual economic growth despite the fact that the finite resources of the planet don’t allow for it, and so on, and so on. The Big Question for us is how we can move beyond this system. We doubt the way forward involves enticing the poorest people on the planet to believe that the future must be high-tech, with the gear provided by the biggest corporations in the world. Mitra and Negroponte do not represent forces of liberation but rather forces that seduce people into becoming willing cogs in the prevailing machine. What you see as liberation is simply the seduction to a notion of negative freedom which fits the individual perfectly into the hegemonic status quo. The alternative would be to help communities organise themselves. Mitra wants children to organise themselves, but he seems to loathe the idea of communities doing this. Why? Well-organised and well-educated communities could be loci of opposition. Children who are lured away from their communities to dream of bigger things elsewhere are more likely to simply pursue their personal interest, looking for wealth and success within the prevailing system. I see no liberation there.

I haven’t read enough Gatto to comment effectively. What has put me off him is his embrace (apparently) of a libertarian, market-centred approach to education. He seems to think that to be against the worst kind of schooling and the worst features of compulsory schooling, you also have to be against the state, and for the free market. I disagree. If you see my post about the personalisation of education in the UK, you will see an attempt to rescue something good from the recent history of public schooling in the UK – a history that shows how the embrace of market principles can actually make things worse.

Dear Torn Halves
I am from West Bengal, India. The naxal villages that you have mentioned are so very familiar to me, as is the way of their thinking. In fact while I was reading your essay, I was under the impression that you are a Naxal intellectual yourself, until I read some of your comments. You see, most such left intellectuals in West Bengal have the same endless negative attitude that you have (perhaps more so because the left movement in India never took off, even though they once had high hopes).

Anyway, what I wanted to say is, I come from a so-called “backward caste” in my society. I have grown up in great poverty, and I was literally one of the slum children that Prof Sugata mentions in his talk. I had to study with borrowed books. Fortunately I went to a government supported engineering college, where I learned programming. Then I got a job, and I had to attend courses to improve my english.

I think Sugata Mitra’s experiment is wonderful. Not because he talks about technology, or a cloud model. But he talks about making learning simple, and bringing the chance of learning to everyone. Believe me, millions of children in India would love to learn in any way they can, imperialism or no imperialism. It is very easy to criticize, my friend – but it is very difficult to do something on your own. Now that a Professor has come up with a wonderful new idea to teach kids in a new way, what do you do? You sit in front of your computer and type away and pick holes in his effort! Instead of that, why not do something constructive? Why not start a learning school where you live, and sit back in wonder? Or perhaps start something on your own and give others a chance to criticize it blindly?

Dear Sanjoy, thanks for that interesting reply. You express a point of view which is shared by (I imagine) millions, if not billions of people from developing countries who are jumping at the chance to profit from a model of development dictated by the wealthiest countries and organisations in the world. Of course, if you give people a choice between wealth and poverty, most of them will choose wealth. They will be happy while the model is working, and those helping them pursue wealth will be able to stand back in wonder.

I live in Greece, where people have been actively encouraged to love this model of development for decades now. The model has broken. The unemployment rate among young people is now over 60%. If things are different in India, it is not because of some superiority of Indian culture, but just because for the time being you are prepared to work for less and not complain. That will change, though. You will want more wealth, you will want a higher standard of living. You will get more into debt. The familiar story will be repeated.

Something very strange is happening. If you look back at some of the high points in world history, you see strong world powers that could also raise a claim to being culturally the most advanced – making a real contribution to the progress of civilisation. Is that the case now? We are promoting the creation of wealth. Are we promoting anything else? Wouldn’t it be nice if the rise of India meant the rise of something specifically Indian? There was a time when unhappy materialists in the West looked to India for inspiration. In a few decades time, will they still be able to do that?

Dear Torn Halves
Thank you for your detailed reply – a reply from you, which I should say I have liked for the first time on your page. You can call me Ajoy, which is a shorter form of my name.

You have raised broader issues which belong to our civilization as a whole, and go much beyond what Prof Sugata Mitra is trying to do. My objection in my previous post was about exactly that – you are trying to hold him responsible for, or accusing him of, things on which he has no control. Prof Mitra has thought about popularizing a model of education in his own way, and you bring such abstract things as capitalism and exploitation into the equation – whether they are true or not, he personally is only trying to develop a new model, nothing more than that!

And it is not even a new model – another of our Indians, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, established a school along those lines a century back. There he encouraged children to learn on their own, to be one with nature. But Prof Mitra is trying to bring technology into the learning process, which is praise worthy (I shall tell you the reason why I think so).

Now for your reply to my post. First, I know about Greece, and I entirely sympathize with you. I know what unemployment is, and how it destroys lives. Unemployment rates are high in India also. It has only fallen a little in the last 20 years because, as you say, we are ready to work for less than the average american. But labor rates are increasing in India also, you are correct in that – although productivity is also rising, so our economy is still a little better. But that is another argument.

As for creation of wealth, however, I differ with you. As I understand it, human history is a history of progress in technology and the creation of wealth. Think of the wheel, which increased labor productivity for the first time. Did not that lead to creation of wealth? Or the invention of printing at Gutenberg and the creation of books. Did it not help us progress and increase our wealth? Or the industrial revolution, or the discovery of electricity, railways, and everything else… You see, human civilization has progressed and become wealthier because of our technology! It is our technological innovations that have allowed us to use our labor more productively and become wealthier.

So I am not against the creation of wealth, nor am I against the pursuit of its creation. Moreover, technological innovations will continue. Today we have these boxes called computers, and we stare at screens and we type in words into those boxes using a keyboard. Tomorrow we shall have embedded chips that will project 3D images on any surface we want, and we shall interact with those chips using voice commands. The day after tomorrow we shall only think about what we want to do, and we shall control those chips with our thoughts, while the images will be streamed in front of our eyes. We shall not have a global network of connected computers, but we shall have a global network of connected people.

And here, my friend, is the importance of people like Prof Mitra – they are using the technology that is emerging and helping us evolve towards that future. It is by evolving to that future that we shall become more wealthy – not by denying the progress and application of technology. This has become a long reply, so thank you for your patience in reading it

I should clearly mention two things – I am not related to Prof Mitra or his effort in any way. I heard his name or about his initiative for the first time when I read about the TED prize and watched the speech. Second, I am not defending him merely because I am also an Indian, like him. I would defend visionaries like Nicola Tesla, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs or others with equal effort.

What you are saying is this” “When stuck between a rock and a hard, choose rock because I say so and also think of a way to ht your head with it as that will keep you continuously bleeding.”

You criticise the efforts to tackle what is hard to tackle. You blame the Prof. for forgetting his own country and the harsh realities there. I live in the west and I feel guilty of that. But I do not know how much passion do you or Prof. Mitra have about India or even your own country, so I only talk about my own guilt.

And you offer no solutions either to the problem. Be clear is where you want to go with this post.

You fight seems against big picture capitalism but you have more on your agenda too.

The radical digital reactionary

Jottings and links relevant to the feelgood digital revolution, the closing of the pedagogic mind and ed tech flotsam get posted at our Torn Halves page on Mark Zuckerberg's website.

Why so counter revolution?

If this were a genuine revolution that might put an end once and for all to man's inhumanity to man, we would sign up immediately, take up arms and join the fight. But, as we see it, it raises no such hopes. Instead, the talk of revolution sounds more like hype that conceals the offline growth of corporations, the money economy, and a technological colossus that puts pseudo forms individuality in place of a deeper and more meaningful reconciliation between the overly stressed ego and the world from which it has been estranged.